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CCE in brief

Recovering backpacker, Cornwallite at heart, political enthusiast, catalyst, writer, husband, father, community volunteer, unabashedly proud Canadian.
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Free Market Radicalism and the Peaceable Revolution

He being Mark Carney, that ardent communist and committer of sociology.

I mean, he'd have to be, right? He's suggesting that the pinnacle of human civilization, the free market, has become a radical ideology. That'd be like suggesting that science has become a religion.

Yet he's not the only one. There's a growing chorus of people of position who should, frankly, know better, implying that behavioural economics is at least as if not more important than old-school financial economics.

Maybe it's that they're being Machiavellian in their cunning, feeding false empathy to the masses to continue reaping personal rewards, maybe even get a spike in likability. That can only help their speaking engagement fees.

There is only the free market, after all - everything that gets imposed on top of it, like regulation, is like putting clothes on a naked body or education into the head of naive young minds - all egregious infractions of the traditional order.

Some people are better than others; they rise to the top. If you were better yourself, wouldn't you be at the top? If you argue with that, you're clearly a whiner looking for a handout. See how it works?

Actually, no - it doesn't.

I've made the argument before that ardent free-market capitalism is as naive in its expectations as communism was/is, because both are rooted in an airy-fairy assumption of human motivation and socio-cultural reality.

Of course, I'm the wrong person to be suggesting such a thing; after all, I'm no Mark Carney. Nor have I written books, been on TV or ever been elected to office. I don't even have a klout score that's in the 90s or whatever. Clearly, nobody needs to be listening to me.

I'm actually fine with that, because I'm not looking for audience; I call things as I see them. One of the things I see is a growing number of people calling it the exact same way.

It is absolutely true that lots of rich, powerful, manipulative people have milked the system for all they could and died happy, passing their wealth on to their kids or whoever. There are plenty of people out there right now driving drunk, doing drugs, skipping out on taxes and belittling everyone not as entitled as they are.

But there are less and less of them every day. As the formerly haves become have nots, they begin to realize how little they like being on the wrong side of the equation. They start to recognize what their new peers knew long ago - the system is flawed, unbalanced and unsustainable.

The superstars of the world can keep assuming people are herds to be manipulated - their time is running out. They can blame that, in no small part, on those who are simply lucky.

They'd be wiser to take a look at the positions being taken by the Mark Carneys of world and realize they aren't pandering to the masses; they're laying track.